How to Grow Chaya, or ‘Tree Spinach’

Chances are that unless you’ve spent some time in the Yucatan, you’ve not heard of chaya, also called tree spinach. But you can grow chaya here in the United States, in a pot in cold places and in the ground in warm ones.

Here’s how to grow it, and what to do with chaya once you have some.

Why bother? Well, chaya, Cnidoscolus aconitifolius, is a green leafy vegetable that likes hot weather — a rarity. It is also extremely nutritious, to the point where some call it a superfood.

I just like it because it tastes nice, a lot like spinach, only sturdier, and I can grow it here in Sacramento. If you live in agricultural Zone 9 or warmer, you can grow chaya in the ground.

It likes moisture, but is also pretty drought tolerant. I water mine once a week, although I should probably water it more for better yields. It will lose its leaves in winter here, but will grow larger each year.

Anything colder than Zone 9 and you will need to protect the plant in winter with a heap of straw or somesuch over the base of the plant in fall. I would not grow chaya in the ground in anything colder than Zone 8 though. It can be grown in large pots and moved inside, where, so long as it doesn’t freeze, it will live for years.

Here in Sacramento, I planted my chaya in partial shade. It is an understory plant in the Yucatan, so I reckoned that the full-on, 115°F desert sun we get in summer would kill it. It prefers good soil but will handle so-so soil. It needs to be well drained, though.

The first year chaya grows very slowly, so this is a multi-year project if you want to grow your own. After Year One, it will grow much faster, and will reach 6 feet tall eventually, larger in places like Florida. In its native Yucatan, chaya can grow much, much larger, like 20 feet tall.

Harvesting and Cooking Chaya

It is as simple as picking leaves — never more than half of a plant — but the sap or juice from the plant can irritate your skin, and some varieties of chaya have stinging hairs on them similar to nettles. Most cultivars you can buy lack these hairs, however. Mine doesn’t have them.

The leaves have a volatile toxin in them that dissipates when cooked, so you need to cook your chaya for at least 10 minutes. And be sure to avoid aluminum pots when you cook it, because aluminum causes a reaction with the juice of the plant that will give you diarrhea.

For most of us this is not a problem, since most American pots are steel or iron or enameled. And you typically eat chaya in soups, as an ingredient in tamales, or as a green cooked like Southern collards. It’s not a salad green.

Chaya Nutrition

I’m into green vegetables with big nutrition values, like nettles. Chaya is the same way.

A USAID document intended for use in Cambodia that urges Cambodians to grow the Mexican plant notes that chaya is very high in protein, calcuim, iron, and Vitamins A and C.

A 100 gram serving, about 1/4 pound, provides 15 percent of your daily protein needs, about 30 percent of your daily calcium, 50 percent of your iron, 27 percent of your Vitamin A and an enormous, 300+ percent dose of Vitamin C. Take that, oranges…

Note that with cooked chaya, most of that Vitamin C will be in the broth or water. So don’t toss it.

There is also some evidence that chaya can help people with diabetes. At the very least it won’t hurt.

Getting Your Own Plant

OK, if you are convinced and want to grow chaya, how to get started? I bought my plants from Sow Exotic in Florida. They are often sold out, so other options would be to try Etsy, or even Amazon.

You definitely want to buy cuttings or, better, a rooted plant. All the stingless cultivars seem to be sterile, so seeds are out.

Buy a couple plants if you can for better yields. They’d make a cool hedge if you live in the right place.

Chaya Recipes

As I mentioned above, you have all sorts of options for chaya as a cooked green, so think anywhere from Southern collards to Indian saag paneer to Irish colcannon. I love chaya in these Italian dumplings.

But if you really want to give chaya its due, you want to look to Mayan cuisine, which means southern Mexico down to about Costa Rica. This is where Chaya is from, and where you will find the most recipes.

I’ve seen recipes for everything from empanadas stuffed with chaya, tomato and onion; balls of chaya, corn masa and eggs, cream of chaya soup (like a cream of spinach soup); chaya tossed into innumerable soups and with pretty much every other vegetable imaginable; even a soufflé.

I love chaya tamales. These are from the Yucatan Peninsula and are basically simple tamales with chopped leaves in the mix. No filling. You serve them with the salsa of your choice, in this case a tomato sauce spiked with habaneros.